[itsjaredc]

That is the point of this post, to get them over the fear, to give them the confidence to do it.

Having a personal tutor can accelerate the learning process dramatically. Even if you can teach yourself, you can learn faster if someone just tells you the answer. But, you can also just do it. And, the process will teach you the benefits of being precise with your searches and that if you know to use the work "toggle" rather than "switch back and forth", you'll get to the answer faster next time (though, you'll get to it both ways and you'll learn a lot while you're reading).

I was fortunate enough to have great engineers accelerate my learning but I also did a lot on my own and that process gave me a deeper understanding and taught me the right mindset to now continue improving on my own forever.

[sophacles]

I propose that we are running into a very studied phenomenon in teaching: expert knowledge vs novice knowledge. The expert sees stuff as simple and straight-forward that causes confusion in the novice -- because the novice doesn't fully have the framework with which to understand in place yet.

To get to a point where googling and reading can be really effective (for most people... there are some who can just naturally pick something up) it helps to have someone work one-on-one with the confusion that may otherwise be insurmountable. Not just accelerate learning, but in fact, enable it at all.

There is a very real problem in teaching at all levels where research will show that using new methods and alternate course progressions help students get it faster, but the experts in the subject matter will veto it because it is not the way they learned or presents things in a way that seems too round-about from the expert point of view -- ignoring the difference between those who have the framework and those who need to get the framework.

[espeed]

Spot on.